Small world

[maradydd]

There's a post up on BoingBoing today (ok, yesterday for me) about open vs. closed search algorithms, suggesting that the search algorithms used by Google, Yahoo et al are bad because of their lack of transparency. It invokes a comparison to an important concept in computer security: "security through obscurity" is dangerous because an effective encryption scheme should be equally hard to break whether you know the internals of the algorithm that generated the ciphertext or whether you don't.

I think comparing this to search is a bad (or at best misleading) idea, and expounded on this in the comments. But I'm far more entertained by the fact that the two best comments on the post so far come from two sources with whom I am tangentially familiar, albeit from totally different directions: jrtom and radtea. Small damn world!

Comments

[enochsmiles.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind, too, that subverters operate in a weird sort of way as parasites on search services. If they break one--i.e., render it unusable for usual IR tasks, so people use them less or not at all--then the benefit of having subverted the system is decreased or eliminated.

Yep; this issue is what makes the whole thing so interesting to me. I'm dealing with a similar problem in a field that makes most of these problems look trivial -- with the added aspect of an entity that wants to make the system breakable, but only by them, but in such a way that they don't lose users due to attrition because of their having broken the system.

The game theoretics of both problems are very similar, but (in both cases, actually, though more-so in this one) it is premature to discuss them until we know whether the parasites will always kill the host or not.

(There's comparisons to be made to email and spam, but they're fairly obvious, I think.)

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

with the added aspect of an entity that wants to make the system breakable, but only by them, but in such a way that they don't lose users due to attrition because of their having broken the system.

This is precisely what's going on here, as there is competition among parasites.

(And yeah, I'm familiar with the email/spam comparison; that's the field I've been working in for the past 18 months, along with things like botnets and phishing and so forth.)